Vocabulary-Based Language Similarity using Web Corpora

Abstract

This paper will focus on the evaluation of automatic methods for quantifying language similarity. This is achieved by ascribing language similarity to the similarity of text corpora. This corpus similarity will first be determined by the resemblance of the vocabulary of languages. Thereto words or parts of them such as letter n-grams are examined. Extensions like transliteration of the text data will ensure the independence of the methods from text characteristics such as the writing system used. Further analyzes will show to what extent knowledge about the distribution of words in parallel text can be used in the context of language similarity.

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